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I’ve been designing things for a while now,
apps, systems, brands, interfaces,
and somewhere along the way,
I started asking a question I couldn’t stop thinking about.
Not in the textbook sense. Not the business school definition. I mean, genuinely, when you hear the word product, what comes to mind? Because I’ve noticed that the answer is seldom the same twice.
Ask a product manager, and they’ll talk about roadmaps, user stories, and sprint cycles. Ask an industrial designer, and they’ll sketch you something you can hold. Ask a software engineer, and they’ll point to a codebase. Ask a brand strategist, and they’ll say it’s a feeling. Ask someone on the street, and they might hold up whatever’s in their hand.
Everyone is right. That’s the strange part.
I work at the intersection of design and financial systems, building payment interfaces, developer tools, and embedded products that most people never see but interact with every day through other surfaces. And one of the things that working in that space has taught me is that the things we call “products” are seldom just things.
A payment flow is a product. But so is the trust someone feels when a transaction clears instantly. So is the anxiety they feel when it doesn’t.
When I started thinking about new projects, things I could add to my portfolio, things I could pitch, things I genuinely wanted to build, I kept running into this wall. Does this count? Is a zine a product design project? Is it an editorial data experience? Is it a brand system? Is it a speculative app concept that exists only as a prototype?
I kept filtering my own ideas through a narrow definition I hadn’t even consciously chosen. And I think a lot of designers do this. We gatekeep ourselves out of entire categories of work because we’re not sure if it “qualifies.”
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: product is not a medium. It’s not a job title. It’s not even a thing.
If someone made it with a purpose, and someone else encounters it and it changes something for them, even slightly, that’s a product. The change can be functional. It can be emotional. It can be cultural. It doesn’t matter.
A chair is a product. So it is a ritual. So it is a language. So it is a law. So is a typeface that shifts how a generation reads. These things were all designed, maybe not by someone with “designer” in their title, but designed nonetheless. Someone chose what it would be and how it would behave in the world.
And when you start thinking that way, the field of product design stops being a lane and becomes something closer to a lens.
I’ve been listening to design podcasts for years. They’re good. They cover craft, process, tools, and career. But they tend to live in their own worlds, UX over here, industrial design over there, brand in another room entirely. Product management in a whole separate building.
That’s the conversation I want to have. Not as a provocation but as a genuine inquiry, with product designers who came up through engineering, with industrial designers who now work in digital, with brand strategists who think about product experience, with researchers who study how people form relationships with objects and systems and interfaces they didn’t choose.
Because the more people I talk to, the more I realize the definition is always a mirror. What someone calls a product says a lot about how they see the world, what they value, and what they think design is for.
If you’re a designer reading this and you’ve ever wondered whether your project is “product-y” enough, whether your side work counts, whether the thing you made that doesn’t fit a clean category is worth showing, I want to offer a different frame.
Everything is a product. The newsletter you wrote. The template you built for yourself. The system you designed for a client that nobody will ever see, but will feel every day. The speculative concept you prototyped alone because you couldn’t stop thinking about the problem.
Answer that, and you’ve already done the most important design work.